Lydia Cacho

A partir del caso de un hotelero de origen libanés y residente en Estados Unidos, Jean Succar Kuri, que abusó sexualmente de menores en Cancún y contó con la protección incondicional de autoridades locales y políticos de gran envergadura, Lydia Cacho nos descubre una monstruosa trama de corrupción, pederastia, tráfico de influencias y blanqueo de dinero. Un caso aún por resolver que pone de manifiesto la indefensión ante los abusos de la autoridad y expone una de las más graves lacras de nuestra sociedad: la pornografía infantil.… (plus d'informations)

Irrefutable Work of a Veteran Journalist

Slavery Inc. is a brief introduction to Cacho's years of tireless work as an investigative journalist and political commentator. The book is very ambitious in several of its thesis, but some of the details to support her conclusions are not explained in sufficient detail.

I believe every word that Cacho has written. She describes a terrifying and realistic world in which tens of thousands of women are turned into commodities. Cacho correctly says that these women are slaves. The author's on-the-ground research should have been the backbone of this book.

One of the conclusions that she spells out very well is that such women are "slaves" because they are taken advantage of first by political and economic circumstances, and later by traffickers. The original title of the book, "Slaves to Power," speaks to that point. A conclusion that rings true to me is the connection between neo-liberalism and human trafficking, but it is not fully explained in the book, despite being repeated several times. To undercut her own point, Cacho spends an equal amount of time discussing case-studies about women from developed versus underdeveloped countries.

The first half of the book includes stories from individual countries mixed in with Cacho's sociological beliefs. These chapters have some cohesion, unlike the second half, which breaks down into very amorphous chapters (with the exception of an excellent chapter on money laundering). The flow of the book seems to break down quite frequently because of long excerpts cut from studies and NGO reports that don't often fit with the prose. Perhaps it is my fault for not understanding all of the sociological jargon used in the book.

Cacho does an excellent job discussing whether to fight the "supply" or the "demand," much like the drug debates of the '80s and '90s. Cacho's conclusion is that both need to be tackled, but more importantly, gender roles need to be retaught to younger generations of both sexes.

Nevertheless, the book is powerful. It presents a world that, unfortunately, rings all too true and needs to be corrected.… (plus d'informations)